Artist creates bunny self-portraits

There are only three days left to hop over to the Contemporary Arts Center and ruminate over Alex Podesta's eerie "Copies and Doubles" exhibit, one of the most ambitious and certainly the strangest sets of self-portraits you're ever likely to see.

In the center of the small egg-shaped gallery you'll find a pair of 6-foot-2-inch white bunnies lying on their bellies like children as they perform ear surgery on a toy rabbit. The big bunnies' feet and hands are disconcertingly human. Their identical bearded faces are the spitting image of Podesta. The other four barefoot bunnies in the room are Podesta clones as well -- Bugs Bunny meets the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Alex Podesta beside a bunny-like facsimile

The installation inspiration began when Podesta, 34, fondly recalled the coverall pajamas he'd worn as a child, with those non-skid rubber soles on the built-in feet.

In 2004, North Carolina-born Podesta had signed up for the University of New Orleans' prestigious master's of fine arts program. Previously, he'd made provocative sculptures depicting medical procedures, a prayer stool equipped with restraining straps, and a wounded wall oozing red velvet. But he was ready for a change.

After "casting about aimlessly for other ways to work," Podesta decided to take his art in a lighter, more crowd-pleasing direction.

"I realized art-making could be humorous and entertaining, and perhaps more compelling in that way," he said.

"I started remembering a one-piece pajama I had as a child, the security, sensitivity, the relation I had with it."

Podesta's PJ recollection merged with his memory of the 1997 cult film "Gummo," which featured, he said, a teenage character who wore bunny ears as a kind of security blanket.

"The bunny just seemed natural," he said. ". . . I thought how absurd it would be to see a 6-foot bearded man in one of these bunny suits."

How true.

Podesta cast his hands, face and feet in resin and attached them to handmade foam mannequins coated with fake white fur. Most onlookers will find them a touch creepy -- all mannequins are a touch creepy, even if they're not wearing bunny suits -- but Podesta has become immune.

"In all honesty, I've lived with these things so much, they're not disturbing in the least to me," he said.

Podesta lived with them so much, in fact, that in his imagination the big bunnies began taking on Twilight Zone lives of their own.

"They had such a presence, I started inventing these fantasies," he said. "What are they doing after I leave the studio at night?"

What would the sculptural reproductions of an artist do? They would make art, of course, Podesta reasoned. They might even try to make sculptures of him. And so they do, trimming a toy rabbit of its long ears to make it more human-like and creating a small mask that looks just like -- you guessed it -- Alex Podesta.

Curiouser and curiouser.Podesta's big bunnies attempt to transform a smaller stuffed bunny into a portrait of the artist.

"I don't know if I'm absolutely plumbing the depths of my soul," Podesta said of his surreal self-portraits. ". . . I don't have a secret desire to be converted into a bunny."

Maybe not. But he does seem to have a desire to help us understand what it's like to be an artist. Despite its surface silliness, "Copies and Doubles," with its combination of childlike wonder, drive for originality, craftsmanship, campiness, and narcissism, is a plunge into the rabbit hole of contemporary artmaking.

COPIES AND DOUBLES

BY ALEX PODESTA

What: A strange installation of self-portrait sculptures by the recent UNO graduate.